Now is the time to watch “Lost”
There’s nothing else going on right now. Sports are cancelled, work is imaginary, and Netflix is rapidly running out of Jason Bateman vanity projects. We’re making bread from scratch and doing laundry in our bathtubs like we were beamed back to the Oregon Trail.
But now is not the time to despair. Now is the time to watch Lost.
Watching all 118 episodes is a massive undertaking. That comes out to almost four complete sleepless days of television. In a normal time, that would be insanity. Now, it’s the perfect length for people with nothing to do. I have never seen Lost before, and have attacked the project with relish. I finished season one last night.
Lost has never been more relevant to real life. We are all now trapped in our own islands (our homes) with our own mysterious psychopaths (boyfriends, roommates, pets.) Outside everywhere are mysterious threats we don’t understand. Evangeline Lilly is saying things that make me feel insane.
Watching the show has felt like recognizing a coworker in a dream. Like constantly looking up and saying “Oh hey, you’re here.” From participating in pop culture, I had absorbed more knowledge about the show than I realized. I knew there would be polar bears, a smoke monster, a mysterious hatch. I knew the characters included Jack, Kate and Hurley. “Is that Sawyer?” I asked my boyfriend in the third episode. It was. I knew there was a character named Sawyer, and it seemed to make sense that Sawyer was him.
The credits include names I recognize. J.J. Abrams. Damon Lindelof. That guy from The Vampire Diaries. Daniel Dae Kim is a famous hot guy. I didn’t realize this is where he started being famously hot.
As soon as I start tweeting about watching Lost, Lostheads start coming out of the woodwork. I never knew so many of my friends were deeply into the show, and that they still have strong opinions about the characters. My friend Davy tells me he named his houseplant Rousseau. I am now in a group chat with him titled Flight 815.
I also recognize a version of myself if I had started watching Lost during its 2004 inception, when I was a junior in high school. Sawyer would have been a formative crush. Kate would have been the source of my body issues. I would have obsessively trolled the message boards, furious at cliffhanger endings. The immense privilege I have to watch now, when I can just press “next episode,” isn’t lost on me.
If you watched Lost back in the day, then in the words I know will be spoken eventually in an episode I have not yet seen, “We have to go back.” Now is the perfect time for a rewatch for the 2004 obsessives. My boyfriend was like a little kid, he was so excited. “Wade!” he shouted at one point. I didn’t yet know who Wade was. I do now. “Don’t you remember how obsessed everyone was with those numbers?” he asked me many episodes later. I didn’t, but I was happy he had those fond memories. Rewatching it will make you remember why you liked it so much…at least for the first two seasons, I’m told.
So come on, you all, everybody. It’s time to watch Lost.